Audiofiles and Information from our Previous Events

The New School at Commonweal Presents: Community Gathering with Carl Anthony -- Thought Leader in Environmental Justice. This event was held at Commonweal on December 13th, 2007.

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Carl Anthony is one of the preeminent thought leaders in environmental justice in the United States. He is the Founder and was for 12 years was the Executive Director of the Urban Habitat Program, one of the oldest environmental justice organizations in the country. Until recently he was a Ford Foundation Program Officer in the Community and Resource Development unit. He is currently a Visiting Scholar/Ford Foundation Senior Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of California Berkeley.

The mission of Urban Habitat is to promote multicultural urban environmental leadership for sustainable, socially just communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a colleague, Luke Cole at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, he published and edited the Race, Poverty and Environment Journal, the only environmental justice periodical in the country.

From 1991 through 1997, Anthony served as President of Earth Island Institute, an international environmental organization to protect and conserve the global biosphere. Congressman Ron Dellums appointed Carl Anthony Chair and Principal Administrative Officer of the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission in 1993. The Commission was charged with overseeing a National Pilot Project to guide the closure of 500 military bases in the US, to re-envision the role of the National Laboratories, and to implement the conversion of 5 military bases in Alameda County. He has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, the University of California Colleges of Environmental Design and Natural Resources. He has been an Advisor to the Stanford University Law School on issues of environmental justice. Anthony has a professional degree in architecture from Columbia University. In 1996, he was appointed Fellow at the Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Carl is the author of many publications including "Eco-Psychology and the Deconstruction of Whiteness," a groundbreaking chapter in Theodore Roszak's book, Eco-Psychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind.

"Paintings by Claudia Niseema Nolte." Reception was held at Commonweal on September 15th, 2007. Exhibit continued through December 18th, 2007.

Claudia Niseema Nolte was born and raised in Europe and has actively pursued painting as an art form since the 1970's when she was a young teenager. She studied in England, Switzerland and Germany and traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia and Northern America. In 1991 she moved from India to California where she still lives.

Her watercolor "MASKS" has been published on the cover of the award-winning Art & Literary Journal "Milvia Street." In 2000 she started a series of oil paintings featuring spirals, desert views and architecture. Her most recent work in called: Archetypes of the Greek Mythology.

"Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible."
—P.Klee

"Tarantella, Tarantula," with the Artship Ensemble, directed by Slobodan Dan Paich. Performance was held at Commonweal on August 19th, 2007.

Tarantella, Tarantula is a contemporary exploration of dance, music and storytelling that speaks of continuity and passionate age-old practices not alien to our modern needs: a delicate and poignant story. Artship's idiosyncratic style has been described by critics as being at the nexus of dance, theater, cinema and "zen." Tarantella has been employed for centuries by village elders, primarily women, in Italy and elsewhere. The dance's outward purpose is to ward off the negative effects of the poisonous bite of the tarantula spider, but its more general inward purpose is to offer tools to deal with oppression, unrequited love, and longings of the heart that do not have outlets in traditional societies. The performance is not a reconstruction of any particular regional type of Tarantella dance or music, but an immersion in the essence of Tarantella as a poetic framework for the production's narrative. More about Tarantella, Tarantula >>

"Actors-dancers bring lost art of physical storytelling to life."
—R. Howard, San Francisco Chronicle
"Why cannot those poisoned by Tarantulas be cured otherwise than by Music?"
—Athanasius Kircher, Rome, 1641

Slobodan Dan Paich is the principal choreographer and artistic director for Artship Dance/Theater, and is the coordinator for Artship Visual Arts & Community/Cultural Commons initiatives. He also served as director of arts and culture on the board of directors of the International Peace Foundation, Berlin & Vienna from 1996 to 2002. Never far from the rehearsal process in the theater, he has taught performing visual arts and architecture at major performing, visual arts and architecture schools and studios in United States, England, Germany and Italy. Paich has received numerous local, state and national awards for his work in bringing arts and culture-making into the community. More about Slobodan Dan Paich >>

Magna Graeca/Tarantella, S. D. Paich paper for International Conference in Greece on Meaning of Festivals, 2005.

"Sculptures and Performance by Sha Sha Higby." Performance was held at Commonweal on July 7th and the exhibit continued through August 9th, 2007.

International performance/sculptural artist, Sha Sha Higby has performed her unique body of work throughout the United States, and internationally in Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Slovak, Bulgaria, Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, England, Belgium, Germany and Holland. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Solo Theater Artist Fellowship, The Zellerbach Family Fund, the California Arts Council New Genre Individual Artist Fellowship.

She studied for one year in Japan in 1971, observing the art of Noh Mask and theater and then received a Fulbright-Hayes Scholarship to study dance & shadow puppet making and performance arts in Indonesia for five years at the Academy of Music, Central Java, Indonesia. In addition to traveling throughout Southeast Asia to Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), she received an Indo-American Fellowship to study the textile arts of India, and a Travel Grants Fund from Arts International to study in Bhutan. She has also recently studied lacquer arts in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan, through the auspices of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. More about Sha Sha Higby >>

Artistic Statement: "I approach dance through the medium of sculpture. I interweave painterly manipulation of physical materials and textures, which I make one by one from wood, paper, silk, ceramic and gold leaf with a labyrinth of delicate props. My work strives to create a path where movement and stillness meet. Shreds of memory lace into a drama of a thousand intricate pieces, slowly moving, stirring our memory toward a sense of patience and timelessness."

"A Spirituality for our Time." with Thomas Yeomans, PhD, the Founder and Director of the Concord Institute. This event was held at Commonweal on July 16th 2007.

Thomas Yeomans' education was first in Music, Classics, and Comparative Literature, particularly poetry, and then—a sharp turn, with the advent of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology in the 60's—in Education and Psychology.

In 1990 he founded the Concord Institute, in Concord, MA, and shifted his focus gradually from Psychosynthesis to formulating and developing Spiritual/Global Psychology. He has pursued this endeavor in the last decade and a half through teaching, training professionals, writing, and consulting to individuals and organizations. During this time he worked in various European countries as well as throughout North America, and in the 90's he helped a group of Russian doctors and psychologists from the Harmony Institute in St. Petersburg found a post-graduate training institute called the International School for Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Group Leadership.

Two essays by Tom Yeomans: "Presence, Power and the Planet" and "Toward Species Maturity: Spiritual Psychology and the Twenty-first Century"

"Saving the World? What International Philanthropy Can and Cannot Do," with David Bonbright, Director of Keystone Accountability. This event was held at Commonweal on July 9th, 2007.

David Bonbright has been an international grantmaker with the Ford Foundation in Africa during the end of apartheid and with the Aga Khan Development Network in pre- to post-911 Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Originally from Ross, California, David is based in London with his talented South African filmmaker wife, Elaine Proctor. His mission in recent years, through a project he calls Keystone Accountability, has been to create a better way for foundations, non-governmental organizations, philanthropists and other civil society actors to evaluate the actual effectiveness of third sector projects.

This is important as the absence of commonly agreed and effective approaches to assessing and reporting in the social change space is the biggest constraint to increasing the quality and quantity of international philanthropy and foreign aid. But beyond the "inside baseball" of creating third sector accountability, David is a widely traveled and insightful observer of what is happening in the civil society movement around the world. Please see his recent notes on "Hotel Rwanda" below. More about David Bonbright >>

"Hotel Rwanda" download this pdf file

"Joy, Social Intelligence & the Ethical Imagination," with Rick Ingrasci, MD, MPH, This event was held at Commonweal on April 19th, 2007.

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Rick Ingrasci is a healer and activist who has been involved in consciousness exploration and social transformation since the mid '60s. Ingrasci has a strong background in psychiatry, holistic medicine, and community development. He co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility, the American Holistic Medical Association, Interface, and Hollyhock, a retreat center in British Columbia. He is the co-author of "Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Daily Life. More about Rick Ingrasci >>

Some highlights from this talk:

"I really feel that our generation, the sixties generation, had made a breakthrough that was almost like a recidivist, that we went back and rediscovered what indigenous cultures have known for many, many years, which is that carnival and festivity and ritual and ways to experience communitas, which is really spontaneous love in community, is probably a part of how we're going to find our way out of the jam we're in, as a planet let's say."

"Anyone who's spent anytime in Canada knows the Canadians tend to be a kinder, gentler people... The United States is kind of a looking-out-for-number-one, go-get-'em, free market capitalist culture... A lot of people say that Canada is the fifty-first state. Their economy is so tied into ours and their cultural imagination is so connected to our movies and art forms, etc. But in truth, the indigenous cultures in Canada are amazing and very coherent in their consciousness of what life is about. So there's a lot of mutual exchange, in terms of art and imagery and ways to live. The Canadian indigenous peoples were famous for their potlatches for instance: one of the most generous forms of social organization, where the sign of wealth was not how much you kept for yourself, but how much you gave away. And I like that idea. I think we could actually start to apply that a little more generally in the world as we become a global society and have better results than we're seeing with "so-called" global capitalism."

"The Spiritual Labor of Earth Healing," with Peter Warshall, Editor-At-Large for the Whole Earth Magazine and the founder of Peter Warshall and Associates. This event was held at Commonweal on February 27th, 2007.

Download the main talk. Download highlights from the afternoon discussion.

Peter Warshall has worked for thirty years to improve governance and effective citizen participation within local communities, balance conservation and development (especially water resources, ranching and forestry, and biodiversity), as well as teach, guide and write on natural and cultural history and what is now called sustainability. Trained as both biologist and anthropologist, Peter has taken a broad view of the complexity of societal change. While others may work as a scientist or politician, Peter has tried to bridge these realms as scientist/essayist with years of public service. He works on all socio-economic levels and with highly diverse peoples and ecosystems, believing that important beneficial change can come from many unexpected and imaginative human sources. The diverse ecosystems of northern Mexico and southern Arizona and New Mexico presently define his bi-national sense of home. He owns and runs his own small consulting group.

 

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